The OH-6 is a compact light helicopter used for observation, light transport, training and light attack. This particular boxing depicts a Japanese aircraft used in the observation role.

This kit looks to be the Academy kit reboxed for Hasegawa. The molds have been around for quite some time but the moldings don’t show its age. The plastic is typical Hasegawa light grey plastic on four sprues. The plastic was quite shiny and polished. My review copy doesn’t have any flash or blemishes. The panel lines are recessed. There is a sprue of eight dark grey resin parts that includes antennas, FLIR, tail lights and spotlights. The resin pieces will require some careful cleanup but they look really great.

A sprue of clear styrene has the nose and windows.

Since I had picked up Bronco’s lovely little 40mm Bofors gun, I jumped at the chance to review the separate Gun Crew set. Unfortunately for me, they are dressed in more European Theatre uniforms (and possibly early war) while I plan to make my gun one based on Malta, so hopefully Bronco will do a Middle Eastern uniformed crew set in the near future.

That said, let’s take a look in the box and see what we got. There are 6 figures in the kit, which seems a pretty standard crew for the gun, but it could go up to 8 men.

The figures come in 8-11 parts including helmets and gas mask bags. While I have seen a few pictures of crews wearing the gas mask bags, most of the shots I have seen show the crews without these. This wouldn’t be an issue except the straps for the bags are molded to the torsos of the 5 crew members with bags, so some shaving would be required to remove these.

Aires’ new design, which enhances the Electronic Bays, is easily a step up from Trumpeter’s bays. Aires found a weak spot in this area of the A-4 and designed more realistically detailed bays, as you can see in the comparison picture of just how much more detailed the Aires bays look. This kit is a definite upgrade which can be easily detected by anyone admiring your model.